Mixed-use project for St. Paul’s Grand Ave. clears hurdle

At Home Apartments wants to raze three houses on the northwest corner of Grand Avenue and Syndicate Street in St. Paul for a four-story mixed-use project. (Staff photo: Bill Klotz)

St. Paul-based At Home Apartments plans to move its headquarters into its next project – a four-story, mixed-use apartment building on a corner of Grand Avenue facing a popular Kowalski’s grocery store in its hometown.

The management and development company wants to raze three single-family homes on the northwest corner of Grand and Syndicate Street to make way for 26 market-rate apartments, 10,000 square feet of office space and about 1,300 square feet of retail.

The St. Paul Planning Commission on Friday unanimously approved the developer’s request to rezone the parcels to T2 or traditional neighborhood, which allows for medium-density mixed uses, said city spokeswoman Mollie Scozzari. The City Council will vote on the rezoning at an April 5 meeting, she added.

The company, which owns and manages more than 5,000 rental units across the Twin Cities, St. Cloud and Kansas City, plans to use most of the office space for its headquarters. Two floors of underground parking (47 stalls) are also planned. The project is in an area dotted with retail and smaller-scale apartments in the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood.

Finding a spot for a bigger complex along Grand Avenue, a coveted shopping and restaurant district, is somewhat of a coup, one analyst noted.

At Home representatives declined an interview because of the pending request.

In a project narrative submitted to the city, At Home representative Leanna Stefaniak wrote that “the project allows for more new housing stock without severely increasing density” in the neighborhood. The project “will have nominal impact on parking, will bring a retail presence to site in harmony with other neighboring business and will revitalize a corner that has been somewhat dormant,” she wrote.

Two of the three homes on the 0.35-acre site are owned by an entity related to the family that owns Kowalski’s. The other is a single-family house owned by St. Paul-based Grand Heritage Properties. The combined estimated market value for the parcels is $808,500, according to Ramsey County property records. At Home Apartments has a purchase agreement for each of the properties, according to a city report.

At Home Apartments maintains a small leasing office across Grand Avenue from the parcels at 33, 39 and 45 Syndicate St. Its corporate office is about 1.5 miles to the east, just a block off Grand Avenue.

At Home representatives told the Macalester-Groveland Community Council in February that it intends to move its operations to the second floor of the “Grand & Syndicate” project, said Liz Boyer, executive director for the neighborhood organization.

“This isn’t a developer coming into the neighborhood for the first time,” Boyer said. “They own a significant amount of properties in the area, and that’s why they told us they wanted to redevelop that corner.”

The project is “consistent with the neighborhood’s long-range plan to encourage increased density along existing corridors through the neighborhood” and to “encourage mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented development,” the community council wrote in a letter of support to the city.

The project comes as St. Paul has a 1.7 percent apartment vacancy rate, below the metro area’s 2.7 percent, according to the most recent Apartment Trends report from Marquette Advisors.

While most of the recent multifamily development in St. Paul has occurred downtown, the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood is desirable from a demand standpoint, said Matt Mullins, vice president with Minneapolis-based Maxfield Research.

The project “is the type of destination-oriented, infill development that should do really well,” Mullins said. “If you look at the housing stock along that corridor, there’s a lot of infill apartments of eight, 16 or maybe 20 units. But in terms of doing something bigger, the land costs are significant so it’s really difficult to acquire enough land to do something significantly larger.”